• It takes me around 30-90 minutes to prepare a blog post - I'm not a good writer and kind of shy and afraid of looking stupid, so I usually got through lots of revisions. (update: even this short post took me 30 minutes, between editing, answering 5y old questions, and moving baby to new less boring place to sit.)
• We've got a new baby in the house. Every two hours while I'm awake and not at work, I have a little 15 - 20 minute process I need to do. This is enough time to obliterate whatever concentration I had. I'd really forgotten how much there is to do with a baby - it's not so hard (especially after having already done it once) but it's just kind of...a lot. My concentration is always on the edge of a huge gaping void, ready to fall in.
• Battlestar Gallactica is back on. A few other good shows I've gotten turned onto: New Amsterdam, Breaking Bad. Time sinks all.
• Twitter. Before I'm even done thinking a thought, it's on the internet.
• Works really well with having a baby.
• Works on phone
• Can do it while my mind is otherwise unoccupied, like during boring meetings at work.

It was kind of hard to install with UAC getting in the way, but Virtual Earth 3D is awesome. I still wish they would do a rich client like google earth, but this is already better than google earth, both in terms of usability of the interface and amount of data/detail. Here's looking in the direction of my house and Mt. Ranier from the office building I work in (looking east):

Here is the view I get from my office window (looking north into commencement bay):

I can't describe how uncanny this looks. The shapes are perfect. The colors are almost there. The real world has more colors and is higher res. It kind of gives me goose bumps. Makes me feel like I live in the Sims or 2nd Life.

This evening, a co-worker came and told me about some static he was getting for wanting to upgrade an application he was working on from .NET 1.1 to 2.0. The first thing that popped into my mind was something someone told me when I first went to work at Ciber:

My boss was this brilliant guy named Josh and we were discussing why I should upgrade to XP (this was 2002.) I was against it. Windows 2000 Server worked great. I could create multiple web sites in IIS 5.0. I could do this, do that, it was more stable, faster, etc.

Then we went back to my desk and he showed me something like this:

He didn't have to follow the visual with, "So...you like having that many patches applied to your computer?", but he did.

General purpose computer software generally improves over time. You can take the improvements in the form of a bunch of little Band-Aid patches that you might not have applied right, or in the form of an upgrade. With an upgrade you run the risk of having to deal with an unexpected change.

But let's face it: you were going to have to deal with that change eventually anyway, unless you don't plan on sticking around very long. Taking the upgrade, finding what's broken, is inevitable.

Sorry I haven't posted anything here in quite a while. This weblog actually kind of stopped working a while ago, and since I was super busy with other things, I never sat down to get it fixed.

I actually just wasted a ton of time getting it fixed: it turns out that my hosting company had a quota on how much space the account that this stuff is posted under can use, and it had been exceeded. For some reason, I never saw any errors from dasBlog when I tried to post and of course dasBlog was unable to log anything.

So...that's not an excuse. I hope someone still reads this.

One of the podcasts I listen to on the way to and from work is, "A Way With Words" - it's fun to listen (yeah, that's right, a show about English is fun to listen to) and I think listening to it got me about 20 points on the GRE (when I was preparing to take it, I had been listening to AWWW for about 2 months.)

One thing that I've always thought was really odd was the large percentage (I'd say 50%) of their call in listeners from Wisconsin. Some callers are kind of over the top with their criticism of other's grammar, but the Wisconsin folk usually have really interesting questions that they've been thinking about for a long, long time.

AWWW is a fun show and you should check it out if you've got the time. I learn at least 5 things every time I listen.

I recently had a little time to watch something on the idiot box, and after reading Charles Petzold's post about "The Wire", I had to take a look:

The Wire is ostensibly a Baltimore cop show. (David Simon, who created the series, wrote the book A Year on the Killing Streets that inspired the series Homicide.) The title refers to the electronic surveillance that often plays a part in the criminal investigations. Although many of the plot lines involve the Baltimore drug trade, the series has become progressively more ambitious: The second season of The Wire went into the Baltimore docks, and third season investigated the halls of Baltimore political power. For the fourth season, the series is going into the Baltimore public schools.

What's remarkable about The Wire is the depth and breadth of its characters. Besides the cops, we become familiar with a wide range of Baltimore citizens, from street kids and homeless drug addicts, right up to the Mayor and those who want to dethrone him. Nobody emerges as much of a hero or as a devil. Many of the the cops are seriously flawed human beings, and even the cold-blooded killers are imbued with a humanity rare in film or television.

The writing and ensemble acting would be enough to recommend The Wire, but it is also a raw and uncomprising look at America's underclass, and an indictment of the politics and economics that have led to such widespread poverty and despair. So many "serious" TV series are little more than comic books. (24 readily comes to mind.) The Wire is more real than is often comfortable.

The Wire has the reputation of being hard to follow, and that's a fair criticism. It certainly demands some focus and concentration, but is well worth the effort.

Sold.

I watched the first season over the past week and was riveted to my seat. I agree that the level of realism really separates this from other shows on mainstream television (although I pretty much never watch anything but about 10 minutes of CNN a week and the occasional documentary as I am drifting off to sleep.)

I can't wait to see season two, but it has to wait while I finish some other more pressing things.

Source: “The Wire” 4th Season
Originally published on Fri, 08 Sep 2006 14:00:00 GMT

There has been a lot of discussion recently about some posts Joel Spolsky made on his weblog over the past few weeks.

As for the Wasabi stuff (FogBugz being developed in a custom language called Wasabi), Coding Horror says:

Writing your own language is absolutely beyond the pale. It's a toxic decision that is so completely at odds with Joel's previous excellent and sane advice on software development that people literally thought he was joking. He had to write an entire follow-up post to explain that, no, he wasn't kidding.

I kind of agree with this statement, but I think this is a gray area, and Joel is just the other side of gray from me and most developers.

Lots of people write applications that may as well be in their own custom programming language.

If you:

• Have more than 100 lines of XML in a config file
• Write code that does reflection based on the contents of strings it got somewhere (config file, database - like DataBinder.Eval, or DataView.RowFilter, if you're a .NET developer)
• Write code that doesn't closely follow the business model you are working in (ex. you have classes named like "SessionEntityLayerManager" in an application that helps people sell used cars)

...then you have written an application in a custom programming language.

Never mind the semi-colons, curly braces, case sensitivity - that stuff is irrelevant. If I don't know what a SessionEntityLayerManager is, I don't know your language. If I have to look at a .config file to figure out what a program does, then the program must be in the config file. Guess what - "your config schema" isn't one of the programming languages listed on my resume. I will have to learn it to understand your program.

I bet Wasabi is actually almost the same as vb script, just with different keywords for doing loops or recursion or something like that. Macros. If Joel's team had implemented anonymous delegates or something functionally equivalent in VB Script, VB, C++, whatever, and put it in a method called "Fazooble" it would be more confusing than what Wasabi probably looks like. I can imagine what it would look like to put anonymous delegates in vb script. I would probably be able to guess what it did - it would be symbolic! I can't imagine what "Fazooble" does.

Wasabi is probably more like a code generator than lisp.

I think in the future, as more and more advances are made in topics like DSLs and light-weight scripting languages, we will see more and more people developing in things that kind of look like Wasabi. Or maybe not. Maybe DSLs are a fad. Who knows?

Source: Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark?
Originally published on Tue, 12 Sep 2006 07:59:59 GMT

I just recently started using my own build of Castle.*, built with PDBs and not strong named, so I can step into the source code and understand better how it works.

I find it interesting that before I had PDBs, I could Go To Definition at design time and see the public interface of any Castle.* (or any other really) type - one of my favorite new features in VS2005.

However, now that I have PDBs, I sometimes start debugging as a short cut to go see the source code - the PDBs know where the source code is, but G To Definition doesn't.